Using eight-foot fluorescent tube lamps
to manually paint “ribbons” or “sheets”
of light for light painting and compact
fluorescent or incandescent lamps for her
signature light graffiti, DaSilva is able to
create perspectives made visible solely due
to the camera’s magnificent ability to record light moving through time and space.

Working in darkness, usually at night,
DaSilva makes single-frame time exposure
photographs during which she enters the
frame and moves around the environment
with a light source before closing the
shutter. The resulting still image shows
the trajectory of DaSilva’s actions within
the site. This interplay between artist and
environment is also known as intervention art, presenting viewers with a striking
portrayal of the artist’s direct relationship
to each situation photographed.

GAINING WATTAGE

Although DaSilva has been working with
light painting and light graffiti for many
years, winning the 2012 solo grand prize
of Art Takes Times Square—a competition comprising more than 35,000 artists
presented by Artists Wanted in New York
City’s Times Square—extended her visibility
in a major way. Her winning photograph,
“Jasmine/Never Sorry (for Ai Weiwei),”
made in support of the Chinese artist and
activist who was detained by Chinese police without official charges for more than
two months, was featured half-page on the
front of the New York Times Arts section and
projected nightly on 13 major electronic
billboards in the “Times Square Moment”
exhibition—the largest coordinated effort
in history by sign operators in Times
Square. This remarkable exposure led to interviews with ABC television and New York
City’s local TV syndicate NY1, along with
numerous other media mentions, new art
world contacts, sales and exhibitions.

Although winning the Artists Wanted
competition was a watershed moment of
sorts for her career, or as DaSilva describes
it, when “it all collided like a perfect
storm,” it hardly manifested out of thin air.

“Perseverance is critical. Careers are made
incrementally,” she says, “with each and every step contributing to the previous one.”
And for DaSilva, those steps have been
accruing for decades.

LETTING THE LIGHT SHINE IN

Raised in “a very loving, middle-class family” in the Pennsylvania suburbs, DaSilva
was introduced to art not through mentors
or museums but through her adolescent peers. When she was 13, the family
moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and
one of DaSilva’s first new acquaintances
(and still a dear friend) was Beth Lucas, a
regular at the local Baum School of Art.

DaSilva was so “blown away by how and
what her friend could draw and paint,”
she says, she thought Lucas was born with
special powers. (Lucas is now head scenic
artist at Macy’s Parade Studio, where she
is responsible for the fantastic floats in
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.) DaSilva’s
middle school and high school art teachers, Herb Martin and James P. Musselman,
took the reigns next, providing her with
the training and inspiration that she’s
been building on ever since.

Cut to Pennsylvania’s Kutztown University, where DaSilva’s passion for art making was further fueled by her professor
James F.L. Carroll while she pursued a BFA
in photography. Carroll “single-handedly
opened up the world of New York City
artists” to students through his visiting
artist program, DaSilva says. This, in turn,
led her to an internship with Joan Jonas—a
pioneer video and performance artist who
became a great inspiration—as well as
myriad other opportunities.

It was also during college that DaSilva
met legendary contemporary artist
Keith Haring, a Kutztown native, whom
she describes as “incredibly prolific and
inspiring.” Haring’s influence on her is not
difficult to discern. Like DaSilva’s, his art
was deeply inspired by New York City street
culture, graffiti art, and social and political
issues, and it was also often created in
public spaces.

DISCOVERING THE CREATIVE FLAMEWITHIN

DaSilva made her first photographs atKutztown University with an analog NikonFM, at which time she became almost im-mediately fascinated with time-exposureimagery. And while she “loves all types ofphotography,” DaSilva says, she committedearly on to concentrate her efforts on mak-ing light painting and light graffiti images.

Following graduation, DaSilva movedto New York City, where the hip-hop andgraffiti movements were exploding. Thereshe worked as Gary Schnieder’s black-and-white darkroom assistant, as a photo editorat HBO and as Richard Serra’s personalassistant, among other jobs, to supporther personal work. “I wanted to alwayskeep my photography focused strictly onfine art,” explains DaSilva, “with the goalof building a body of work regardless ofwhether or not I could make a living frommy art.”DaSilva is greatly influenced by DanFlavin and Richard Serra, as well as JamesTurrell, Doug Wheeler and Robert Irwin,“some of my favorite artists of the lightand space movement,” she says, butshe is “most influenced by the desire tocontribute and raise awareness of socialand political causes through her work.”Likewise, this was the goal for her winningphotograph “Jasmine/Never Sorry (for AiWeiwei).” “I believe, as many do, that AiWeiwei is the most important living artisttoday,” she explains. “He represents thefight for freedom by example.”

REFLECTING ON BIGGER ISSUES

The motivation for “Jasmine/Never Sorry,”
which she considers her most important
text piece to date, came about while she
was clearing an abandoned silk mill in
Easton, Pennsylvania, to make her first
floor-to-ceiling text piece for a June 2011

solo show in New York. Upon learning
of Ai Weiwei’s arrest on April 3 of that
year, the words never sorry came to her,
from the title of Alison Klayman’s then
upcoming documentary film about
the artist. “Graffiti has at its core an
authority-defiant-driven motivation, so
my idea was to cover the two walls with
the words never sorry using a pale yellow
lamp to reference the color of the Jasmine flower and the Jasmine Revolution
of 2011,” explains DaSilva.

It was a transcendent experience.

While working in the dark with a single
lamp and a scaffold on wheels, she
“thought very intensely about Weiwei’s
detention, interrogation and suspected
abuse and torture. The cavernous space
was intimidating and scary to work in at
night,” she says. “It was a monumental
moment for me as an artist,” one that enabled her to “tap into the creative awareness cloud of artistic practice and social

Although winning the Artist Wanted competition was a watershed
moment of sorts for her career, or as DaSilva describes it, “when it
all collided like a perfect storm,” it hardly manifested out of thin air.

”Perseverance is critical. Careers are made incrementally,” she says,
“with each and every step contributing to the previous one.”

GUAP (2013): Inspired by a Big Sean hip hop song,
DaSilva used a bank vault as a backdrop for the light
grafitti image Guap, which is slang for a lot of money.